Ajami: Middle East Pulp That Isn't Just Fiction

This story set in the Ajami neighborhood of Yaffa - a cultural clash of Arab Israelis, illegal Palestinians, Christian Arabs, Muslims and Jews - is remarkable not only for the story it tells, but the story of its making, both of which are worth notice.

Ajami relates the travails of a series of young people - a Muslim Israeli teenager and his younger brother, an illegal Palestinian restaurant worker, the Christian Arab benefactor he works for, an Arab Israeli cook and his Jewish girlfriend, and a Jewish cop with a missing brother. Their stories, involving drugs, assassinations, spontaneous violence, repayment of debts, and dangerous romances, are told in five separate non-sequential sequences that all eventually come together at the end...much like an Arab-Israeli Pulp Fiction.

But the movie is even more remarkable when you consider how it was made: by two filmmakers, one Arab and one Jewish, who decided to become friends in order to join their stories and collaborate over a period of two years. And who enlisted all the actors in the film from actual young people - non-actors - living in the neighborhood, who were given characters and situations and asked to essentially improvise their lines.

What results is a film that is remarkably fresh...with hugely appealing characters and emotionally charged realistic dialogue. I guess you might call this Arab/Israeli mumblecore, but whatever it is, it's fascinatingly great filmmaking.

The main character is Omar, an open-faced, charming young Muslim Israeli who has the unfortunate luck to have an uncle who unthinkingly killed a criminal Bedouin who was trying to shake down his restaurant. The Bedouin gang took the shooting personally, and is out for revenge: first shooting Omar's uncle, then going after Omar himself. Omar's only way to get the death sentence lifted is to appeal to a local restaurant owner, a Christian Arab who can negotiate a truce...and who also happens to have an eligible daughter who likes herself a little bit of that illicit Omar (without her father's knowing, of course).

The story takes off from there, eventually intersecting the lives of the other characters: the illegal Palestinian, who's mother has bone cancer; the Jewish cop, whose brother has gone missing; and the Arab cook who just wants to hang loose with his Israeli chick.

Even though the stories are all deeply specific to the Ajami neighborhood, and suffused with the tensions between Arab and Jew, Muslim and Christian, and so on, they stay focused on everyday life - that is, if gangs, drugs, and teenage romance are your everyday life - rather than the Palestinian/Israeli conflict itself...which remains in the background, merely the permanent environment against which these lives play out. One could easily imagine similar stories of young people taking place in the barrios of L.A. or the streets of Miami, only the religious and ethnic conflicts here are certainly more complicated.

Yet Scandar Copti and Yaron Shandi - our two writer/directors - manage to let us understand the cultural context as well as the deep tragedies and exuberance for life that comprise this neighborhood of permanent conflict and violence. Each character in our story is appealing: a young person of good intention just trying to survive in the world. Yet each character gets ineluctably caught up in the violence of the neighborhood. The scenes where families mourn the sudden violence and news of death on all sides of this conflict are all authentically moving; no doubt such authenticity from these non-actors coming from their own real-life experience of such tragedies.

This movie, to me, represents a real step forward from our Middle-Eastern filmmakers. Not just atmospheric, and not just exploring a subject of political or human interest - the film also has its own internal filmic life, the camera always capturing a fascinating interaction of character, the writing always taking us in fresh direction, but never forgetting the ultimate thread of the story. Copti and Shandi deliver something, I fear, that Tarrantino has never quite. Not just blastedly good dialogue and entertaining storytelling that references the gangland film making tradition, but a movie about something real as well. Unlike Tarrantino's films, the violence in Ajami is really felt, politically relevant...and deeply mourned.

Shutter Island: Scorsese Makes Psychology Thrilling

Before you even walk into Shutter Island, you know it has all the elements of a good Scorsese drama: New England cops, stern guards, weird weather, period atmospherics, classical references, and Leonardo diCaprio. The only question is...what kind of movie is it? A police procedural, where two marshals from the mainland are invited to an isolated island of the criminally insane to track down an inmate who's gone missing? Or is it something else?

Scorsese doesn't answer this question until nearly the end of the film, and it's his ability to keep this question in suspense throughout that really elevates this material. This is, if you haven't learned already, a movie with a twist - and though I've only seen it once so far, I suspect that it really requires two viewings to fully appreciate all the intricate detail. It's hard to even talk about a movie like this without suggesting, perhaps, more than you should know going in - so those who wish to discover this movie completely for themselves should perhaps stop reading now.

As DiCaprio (playing Teddy Daniels, a World War Two veteran who's now a Federal Marshal) and his new partner, Chuck (played by Mark Ruffalo) first approach the island, they're in a boat, and Teddy is throwing up. He gets seasick, apparently, and as he and Chuck meet each other and talk, Teddy tells him he's not married - his wife passed away in a fire in his apartment. So Teddy is thoroughly devoted to his work.

That work, at first, seems to be to come to Shutter Island and interrogate the good doctors (played wonderfully by Ben Kingsley and Max von Sydow), along with the orderlies and nurses, about the apparently impossible disappearance of a patient - Rachel - from her cell. Rachel has vanished from the guarded cell without her shoes, and without any way off the cliff-strewn island. As Teddy and Chuck interview patients and explore the island, however, the patients warn Teddy to get away: and Teddy becomes increasingly suspicious that something more sinister is going on.

Teddy's suspicions are heightened by a few factors: first, there are the dreams...disturbing images of his dead wife, bloody, wet, and on fire. Dreams as well of his time in Germany, at the Dachau concentration camp, where the bodies of dead prisoners were stacked like sacks of grain, and the German guard committed suicide, but ineffectually, leaving Teddy to watch him slowly die. Could the doctors have some reason to keep Teddy off his guard, to maybe even slip something in his food that would cause these disturbing dreams? Then there's that doctor played by von Sydow - Dr. Naehring - he's a German himself, and Teddy becomes suspicious he may be importing some of the most notorious Nazi techniques here to America.

There's also another ward of patients - Ward C - where the most dangerous of the insane are kept. As the weather on the island gets worse, and they hide together in a cemetery, Teddy confesses to his partner Chuck that he really has an ulterior motive for coming to the island. He believes that his wife's death wasn't just an accident. A pyromaniac who lived in their apartment, a man named Laeddis, was held accountable for the fire. Teddy believes that Laeddis is here, on this island, being held in that notorious Ward C, and Teddy is here to find him.

As Teddy intensifies his hunt, he apparently starts gathering the evidence he needs: evidence of another missing patient being held in the asylum. Of the missing Rachel. Of experiments on the inmates. Of Laeddis himself. And all this evidence is leading Teddy to an ultimate confrontation with Kingsley's Dr. Cawley: if Cawley even intends to ever let Teddy and Chuck off the island with what they've learned.

When that confrontation comes, along with the revelations (the "twist" if you will), the movie asks us to reconsider everything that's come before. When one does, one sees that all the clues were there all along - not just in the atmospherics of Shutter Island, in the creaky castles and windblown crags, but also in the visuals (the streaming of thousands of mice from a cave, the bisected wound on Laeddis's face), the music (which punctuates certain scenes, giving them an odd hyperreality), and the careful choice of metaphoric dialogue.

To some, the heightened music and atmospherics may seem a cheap horror gimmick a la that used in another recent release, Wolfman. But there is a clear purpose (it serves intentionally to delineate the different levels of reality in the film), and perhaps a second viewing might make it all seem, in fact, more essentially clever and thematic.

Dr. Naehring introduces one of the movie's most powerful themes: that the etymology for the word "dream" in German comes from "trauma" or "wound." He leaps from there to the idea of "monster" but there is also an etymological connection to "lie" and "deceive": both of which are decidedly relevant. In a world just emerging from war, murder, and the atrocities of the Nazis, we are asked to confront some of man's most inner evil: there indeed is a great wound to uncover here, lies being told, and monsters that lurk. In the end, Teddy faces a choice. His final words to us suggest that the choice he does make is both deliberate...and monstrous.

Personally, I love movies like this - those that become more than what they seem, and ask us to go back and puzzle the pieces together. The movie can also be read on many different levels: as a psychological thriller, yes, but perhaps also as a political allegory, not only for the 1950's, but also for our own time, so faced as we are with our own atrocities, our own violent nature, our own deep denials. My only quibble is how late into the film Scorsese springs his twist, and how little time that leaves us to assemble the pieces and contemplate the connections. Some people might even feel a little big conned by the film. I would have preferred that a little more doubt had crept in a bit earlier - but then, I suppose, that wouldn't have been a cinematically dramatic. The scene leading up to the big reveal has Teddy running up a metal, spiral staircase in a tall lighthouse - shot with camera angles reminiscent of another 1950's story of a detective facing a psychological moment of truth, Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo. The reference is at once both clever and a little bit trite, the type of gesture reminiscent of Brian de Palma, which in fact may be the style Scorsese is going for here.

Like de Palma, Scorsese has created not a movie so much as a series of fever dreams and cinematic gestures; unlike dePalma, Scorsese wraps it up with a master story-teller's touch...though perhaps he does so a bit too quickly, and with a bit too much exposition. The techniques employed by the good Dr. Crawly do seem to come straight out of the B movie psychoanalysis handbook. But however it is we find ourselves getting to Teddy's final words, they certainly are chilling.

The Wolfman: All Bark and No Bite

Given the commercial success the vampire classes have been having lately (with everything from Showtime's "True Blood" to teenage Twilight), it's only natural the the lycanthropes would wish to get in on the action. Thus the effort to remake the 1941 classic Wolf Man by Jurassic Park III director Joe Johnston seems a logical, if disappointing, development.

Despite the largely well-done casting (Anthony Hopkins and Hugo Weaving especially have fun chewing the scenery as the Elder Sir. John Talbot and the erstwhile inspector Abberline, respectively), this remake of the story is largely lackluster, relying mostly on an overly loud soundtrack of crashing booms and high-pitched violins to create any purely artificial thrills. Benicio del Toro also makes a too stolid Wolfman - playing it humorously straight and making the 1 hour and 42 minute flick seem interminably long.

Part of the disappointment is the way in which the story has been changed from the original to make this Wolfman more a obviously predicable tale about family dynasty dynamics than a psychological exploration of male rage and aggression: as if thrills can be derived from only the most obvious plot developments, when quite the opposite is true (as Martin Scorcese's Shutter Island so ably shows). del Toro, as prodigal son Lawrence Talbot, returns to Talbot castle after his brother has been mutilated by a lunging lycanthrope. Naturally, Sr. Talbot isn't saying much, but wolfishly protects his brood, until Lawrence inherits the wound himself, and slowly turns. Watching Hopkins and del Toro go at it at the end in their big furry costumes seemed more like some kind of weird Sesame Street Street Wrestling match than a climax to a serious thriller, and by this time I was more than happy to see either of them bite the dust.

Johnston stages this as a straight-on remake trying to masquerade as a modern horror flick, with painstaking details on Victorian settings but little budget left over for creative Foley (the loud horror-movie crash he uses every time Talbot gets startled by a dog or a...wolf?...is always the same, and quickly become tiresome). But with little inspiration in the story or the direction, the long stretches of bloody mutilations - besides being needlessly over the top - actually become a bit, well, boring.

There were so many other ways he could have played this film. He could have really delved into the creative psychology of the man/monster...as Scorcese does in Shutter Island, delivering an intelligent as well as involving thriller. Or just given it a bit of camp, a la Van Helsing, at least injecting some popcorn munching fun.

Perhaps most disappointingly, he could have also tried to explore what makes wolf men sexy. We've got sexy vampires steaming up screens both large and small lately, but these pale vampish creatures have nothing on Wolfman potential. A beefed up Michael Sheen in Underworld: Rise of the Lycans suggested what a bit of wolf-sex-appeal could add to the Sylvan folklore. Here we have an entire film devoted to the subject.

I happen believe that if wolf men were really given their full predatory sexual due, they'd make "True Blood" seem like a Sunday school program. Unfortunately, what Johnston offers us are big overstuffed Ewoks with little brains and even less romantic bravura. I just hope he hasn't killed the Wolfman cinematic ethos forever.

Wolfman







Ewok

The Lovely Bones: Afterlife Murder Mystery

Why did director Peter Jackson take on directing the Alice Sebold story of a fourteen year old teenage girl, Susie Salmon, who’s murdered by a sexual predator and must learn to let go of her attachment to the world in a protracted “in between” existence in the afterlife? Probably because at first, this would seem a complete departure from Jackson’s earlier work, Lord of the Rings and King Kong.

Susie is a typical teenage girl living in the mundane 1970’s: she makes ships in a bottle with her father, hangs out at the mall, has a zany, chain-smoking grandmother (Susan Sarandon), writes in her diary, and has a first crush on a boy – Ray, a lithe and elegant Indian Brit who adds an air of foreign romance to Susie’s Midwestern suburban life. She finally meets Ray one day in the hall at school, and he invites her to a date under the gazebo at the mall, where she intends to have her first kiss.

But Susie's innocuous teenage world is cut short when she's intercepted on her walk home by sinister neighbor, George Harvey. Stanley Tucci just received a best supporting actor nomination for this role, and clearly it's the star turn (along with Sarandon) in the film, though I felt that most of George's sinisterness comes from a single Tucci gesture: a kind of coughing inflection that turns involuntarily into a momentary hungry smile every time he speaks of Susie. It's a pretty dead-on illustration of a super-creep, but he does keep you on the edge of your seat waiting for that lustful grin to once again erupt.

Jackson goes to great pains to fully place us into the 1970's style, and this, for me, is where the movie is its most successful, because the style itself becomes a kind of character, as once Susie leaves this mortal coil and enters her imagined dream world, it's populated with heavy symbolism from that 1970's life she once inhabited: the flights of wooden birds in her father's study become a flight of tree leaves turning into birds; the ships in bottles become real ship-size bottle ships that crash into shore when her father's grief drives him to bust up his prize collection. Even that mall gazebo takes a symbolic turn as Susie's center of gravity and symbolic self.

Here, then, one might begin to see the similarities to Jackson's earlier work. The teenage Susie's 1970's world of Partridge family and shopping malls is not too dissimilar from the idealized home of the Hobbits, and the existential threat to this world posed by creepy George is no less distressing than Mordor itself. And if one looks at The Lovely Bones as a kind of Lord of the Rings for our times, then I think the incoherent mythology of the afterlife it portrays starts to make a bit more sense.

This interpretation of Susie as a kind of floating spirit that needs to learn to accept her own death is startling and wonderful, at first: the moment when Susie is killed and only hours later realizes what's happening is handled with enough originality and grace to take your breath away (she breezes past another young girl, running to escape George's clutches, and eventually finds her family, and then her killer). But I say "incoherent" because thereafter, it's not quite clear if Susie's incarnation follows the traditional ghostly rules of something like Ghost, if she's more in a momentary psychological fantasy land (like the cloyingly awful What Dreams May Come), or if this is some kind of Catholic interpretation of purgatory. It seems to be a bit of each and none of these - if anything, the vast beautiful psychological landscapes Susie inhabits most closely resemble the cosmic journey taken by Jody Foster in Contact.

However, what rules I think this afterlife does follow are simply mythological - like they were in Lord of the Rings. Like the dead kings who fight the battle of Helms Deep, Susie is obligated to the world, and cannot leave it until she accomplishes one final task: to identify her killer to her family (and also, it seems, to find a way to have that first kiss she was robbed of). All this strikes me as too much like the EST program of a living Californian, rather than the spiritual journey of a dead 1970's Midwesterner. But then this, I suppose, is what most people have now instead of traditional religion: a kind of gauzy, three-act view of the afterlife in which unresolved conflicts must be resolved, and romantic entanglements must be satisfied, even if one must invent old-Hollywood supernatural ways to do it. Jackson does it here, like he does in his other lost worlds.

It just doesn't work as well for me here, however, since the first half of the movie is so grounded in the modern realism of the 1970's. Sarandon's character of the zany, smoking grandmother does add a pleasant irreality...and I wanted more of that. I wanted Sarandon to come back at the end. I wanted more than an icy dose of random fate for George. I wanted more from Jack and Abigail Salmon, Susie's earnest and intense parents, than Mark Wahlberg (terribly cast) and Rachel Weisz could deliver.

That being said, the movie does leave you with a profound sense of sadness and feeling for life: Sebold's poetry breaths enough, and Jackson is elegant enough with his visual metaphors, that one is fully transported by the experience of this movie, even if, like many Hollywood attempts at the afterlife, it illustrates a world designed more to gently sooth than to really understand. There really is no sense to make out of what George does, in this movie, and the movie seems to want to say, that's not the point. That Susie gets a first kiss, finally, isn't the point for me either - since such a kiss is impossible. The movie, then, has no point...other than, that's life. In a way, that's enough by itself to be haunting.

Academy Awards 2010: Nomination Predictions

Tuesday is the day the nominations come out. As per last year, here are my predictions for this year's nominations. I don't think there are too many surprises, this year. Most of the winners will likely be as they should - except where the huge Avatar field distorts the selections.

Original Screenplay
James Cameron - Avatar
Pedro Almodovar - Broken Embraces
Nancy Myers - It's Complicated
Mark Boal - The Hurt Locker
Quentin Tarantino - Inglourious Basterds

will win: James Cameron, Avatar
should win: Mark Boal, The Hurt Locker

Adapted Screenplay
Nick Hornby - An Education
Wes Anderson - Fantastic Mr. Fox
Joe Penhall - The Road
Geoffrey Fletcher - Precious
Jason Reitman & Sheldon Turner - Up in the Air

will win: Geoffrey Fletcher, Precious
should win: Jason Reitman & Sheldon Turner, Up in the Air

Directing
James Cameron - Avatar
Lone Scherfig - An Education
Wes Anderson - Fantastic Mr. Fox
Katheryn Bigelow - The Hurt Locker
The Cohen Brothers - A Serious Man

will win: James Cameron, Avatar
should win: Katheryn Begelow, The Hurt Locker

Supporting Actress
Zoey Saldana - Avatar
Melanie Laurent - Inglourious Basterds
Penelope Cruz - Nine
Mo'Nique - Precious
Anna Kendrick - Up in the Air

will win: Mo'Nique, Precious
should win: Mo'Nique, Precious

Supporting Actor
Peter Sarsgaard - An Education
Christoph Waltz - Inglourious Basterds
Anthony Mackie - The Hurt Locker
Stanley Tucci - Julie and Julia
Rupert Friend - The Young Victoria

will win: Christoph Waltz, Inglourious Basterds
should win: Christoph Waltz, Inglourious Basterds

Best Actress
Hillary Swank - Amelia
Penelope Cruz - Broken Embraces
Meryl Streep - Julie and Julia
Carie Mulligan - An Education
Emily Blunt - The Young Victoria

will win - Emily Blunt, The Young Victoria
should win - Carie Mulligan, An Education

Best Actor
Sam Rockwell - Moon
Viggo Mortensen - The Road
Colin Firth - A Single Man
Robert Downey Jr. - Sherlock Holmes
George Clooney - Up in the Air

will win - George Clooney, Up in the Air
should win - Colin Firth, A Single Man

Best Film

With ten pictures to choose from this year, this could be a wide-open, zany category. Here's my shot at the ten we're most likely to see.

Avatar
An Education
A Serious Man
Broken Embraces
Fantastic Mr. Fox
The Hurt Locker
Inglourious Basterds
The Road
The Young Victoria
Up In the Air

will win: Avatar
should win: Up in the Air

The Young Victoria: A Royal Love Story

With two Elizabeth movies, Helen Mirren's The Queen, and a successful Showtime series about The Tudors, it seems a mini-genre has been created about the English royals and their saucy comings and goings and political intrigue; and especially about the way that various men close to power manipulate their Queens, and vice versa.

The latest entry in this genre, The Young Victoria - staring a perfectly cast Emily Blunt as the teenage Victoria, and Rupert Friend as her German suitor, Prince Albert - turns out to be a surprisingly tender and moving rendition of the form.

In the Victorian age (1837 - 1901) we're placed somewhere between the bloody intrigue of Elizabeth/The Tudors and the modern polite protocols of today's British Queen, so don't expect any heads to roll or battles to be raged in this outing. In fact, the Victorian era was Britain's high point of peace and prosperity, and the filmmakers are actually quite sly to make a film about the young queen rather than the old, for this is a tale of young hearts and true desire, yet while using the name of a woman ultimately associated with an age of fastidious virtue.

The young Victoria - the little girl being raised as a princess and heir to the throne in the early 1800's - is actually a precocious, lively spirit who is trapped herself in a world of repression by an overprotective mother and her scheming minister, Sir John Conroy, who wishes Victoria to sign the order that would make him official regent upon the death of the King. Victoria stubbornly refuses, innately distrusting Conroy, and knowing that her future is at stake.

It's not too difficult to discern Conroy's character given the way he treats Victoria's dog: variously coddling or kicking depending upon his mood. The dog becomes a stand-in for Victoria herself (a nicely used form of metonymy), and it may be with you - as it was with me - that the affection for dogs in this movie eventually softens your heart, and draws you even closer in to the character's fears and desires.

Even though they are royals, the schemes by various Kings and Uncles to have their way with Victoria's royal powers are portrayed with the kind of boisterous of feuding families - replete with birthday-party embarrassments and nuptial snubs. Only one man, it seems, has Victoria's true interests in mind. That man is the young, handsome Prince Albert, who even as he wins Victoria's heart, still must convince her that he's also worthy of her trust.

It actually surprised me, in the end, how the movie takes a turn away from historical melodrama towards passionate love story. This Queen is perhaps more than those that have come before someone our modern selves can relate to: a younger sister, perhaps, who must learn how to take her place in a dangerous world amongst self-interested family, and decipher with whom she can fully open her heart. Blunt wins us over into the dilemma of the character (as does Rupert Friend as Prince Albert), and even if the movie doesn't quite follow the official history, the ending becomes surprisingly moving, as any story of young people finding true love, told with feeling and felicity, ultimately can be.

It's interesting, then, that a movie genre with such a background of intrigue, social station, and politics ultimately becomes about something else: about the dynamics of young love, and how new lovers, who may be, in fact, the most inspired people on earth, can support the best in each other. It's a bit of a turn from where we started, with plots and contrivances to control the heir and manipulate the throne. But then, perhaps this is like the drift of the Victorian age itself, becoming less about power than about symbolism: and in the case of Victoria and Albert, symbolism for finding the goodness in other people, and using our station to improve the world.

And yes, I admit, I did get weepy in the end. But to be honest, I couldn't tell whether it was the love story, or simply sadness at how our current political life, dull and ruthless as it is, so misses such inspiring figureheads: both their stubborn courage, and their bright idealism.

It's Complicated: William Sonoma Goes Hollywood

The past few weeks, there's been a corporate fight between Cablevision (my local cable channel) and Scripts (the producers of Home and Garden TV and the Travel Channel) that has resulted in HGTV being off the air.

It's been going on long enough that apparently my inner home-show gene activated its survival mechanism and forced me out to see It's Complicated, a barely concocted comedy for women of a certain age, staring Meryl Streep (as Jane) and Alec Baldwin (as Jake) as a divorced couple in their late fifties who discover they still have the hots for each other.

The plot of this inoffensive enough affair is of little consequence, but I do must say that the designer Santa-Barbara style house is fabulous, the flowers perfectly arranged, and food photography worthy of a cover spot on Martha Stewart Living. If William Sonoma were launching a cable channel, this would be its flagship film.

Until I saw this movie, I'd forgotten about the word "yuppie," but there doesn't seem a better adjective that one can trot out from the dictionary of Eighties slang than this to describe this languid affair. It's not so much that the couple in the film both exude the self-absorbed happy-peppy self-indulgence and pre-washed wealth of that over-exposed generation (Alec Baldwin's constant boyish celebration of his naked, unhealthy girth, rubbed in our faces with deluded intimations of supposed sexiness, strikes me as the perfect Yuppie metaphor); it's that the entire production has the feeling of mid-Eighties soap opera of the Dallas/Dynasty variety.

In some cases, the jokes are better (there's a nice zany bit about Jane and Jake being surreptitiously observed by their son-in-law while meeting for a quick poke at a local hotel, as well as a humorously staged scene of pot-induced dating revelations when Jane and her latest boyfriend - Alex, played with sleepy understatement by Steve Martin - and Jake and his wife attend a graduation party for their son). These bits are funny (I laughed, despite myself) and there's no doubt that the intended audience, women in their fifties and sixties, were thoroughly enjoying themselves.

The story is humorous enough when it needs to be, it's just that the self-satisfied wealth (Jane, who lives in a seaside Santa Barbara paradise worth - at least - several million buckaroos, find hers kitchen "limiting" and spends most of the movie planning an addition) and the oblivious narcissism of the characters (she is so out of touch with the world around her that her children are mere happy props in her home style decorations, and she needs a psychiatrist to tell her what to feel) made me want to hate this film, most of the time. Jane and Jake are essentially spoiled well-off sixty-year-old teenagers (there's no way she should could afford that house selling five dollar croissants at her Whole-Foods-ish boutique store): clearly this movie was in the can well before the economy crashed, since it now seems to come from a completely alien world of fantasy upper-middle-class luxury, as if that's the most relevant thing on people's minds.

There's no point summarizing the plot: it goes where you expect. Jane and Jake threaten to get back together, although there's the complicating inconveniences of a new boyfriend for Jane and an existing young wife and kid for Jake, until Jane wises up and realizes...I don't know, that that getting back with Jake wouldn't be complicated enough? That the movie needs a third act? It doesn't much matter.

Part of the problem may be Streep, who is a brilliant dramatic actress but imbues Jane with so much complex interiority that we take her predicament too seriously. Someone like Diane Keaton (who basically performed the same role in Nancy Meyer's earlier version of this story, Something's Gotta Give) would have been more over-the-top, with a heightened comedic reality that might have softened the yuppie ostentation a bit. Watching Streep pick perfect ripe tomatoes in her overstuffed, manicured garden while analyzing her affair with ex-husband Jake is a cliche almost to the point of creepiness: the scene had me ready to find a Saturday-Night-Live actor burst into the frame at any moment to make some self-aware postmodern remark about Jakob Krutzfeld disease or Haitian refugees or something else equally deflating. But unfortunately, that didn't happen.

I may be being too hard on this film. It's not like any animals were killed (though a few more cute dogs might have heightened my enjoyment), it's competently directed (even if Jane and Jake's three kids bounce and hug like Tellitubies every time they enter a scene), and it's certainly passable enough - and probably enjoyable, if you're the target demographic for stuff like this. If you're not, however, don't say I didn't warn you.

Broken Embraces: Almodóvar Matures

For the first hour of Broken Embraces, the latest soap opera from the flamboyant and prolific Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar, you feel you are watching the director’s best film yet. At turns intriguing, surprising, mysterious, and human, the movie opens with an insight into character, memory, and personal history that’s keenly observant to the point of elevating this material above anything that has come from Almodóvar before.

Mateo Blanca (who has, for some mysterious reason, assumed an alias of “Harry Caine”) is a blind screenplay writer, who busies himself picking up sympathetic women on the streets to pass the time when he’s not being consumed by his latest inspiration. (Come to think of it, that could well be a straight version of our director, Almodóvar.) He’s being assisted in his writing life through the attentive care of a woman and younger man (Judit and Diego) – as we later find out, the woman is his former production manager, the young man her son. One fateful morning, a young man named Ray X shows up at Harry’s door, demanding to be seen. Ray X apparently knows much more about Harry’s life than a person should, and is threatening to write some kind of film, vaguely related to Harry’s past.

But of course, the star name in this movie is Penelope Cruz: who plays the character of Lena. Cruz doesn’t show up in the film until this moment, when Harry pulls out a photograph of her from his drawer to show it to his spooky, inquisitive visitor. But she is, indeed, the subject of the movie: Harry’s lost love, the tale of which we find out through an extensive flashback as Harry relates the story to the young Diego while he’s in the hospital, recovering from an unintentional overdose of GMBH.

The story that Harry relates about Lena – including her possessive boyfriend, the head of a powerful bank, as well as Ray X, the spooky young hopeful writer – eventually intersects with Judit and Diego, Harry’s devoted friends (one of whom has a fateful confession to make), and all the threads of the tale eventually come together as superb melodrama.

As my companion in the theater noted, Almodóvar is a kind of Spanish version of Woody Allen – providing knowing set pieces of lives of artistic import and modern relationships. Almodóvar just provides a few twists on the typical Woody Allen approach: more gay, more Spanish, more melodramatic, and more modern. That makes him more interesting – willing to fly a bit higher, and take a few more dramatic risks – and yet, like Woody, Almodóvar insists on bringing his films, at the end, back down to a simple tale of “slice of life” and the quiet desperations of his middle class characters.

We can see the tightly controlled tone of the first half of the movie loosening up as Almodóvar navigates his way to the end – jumping between heightened pathos and incidental slice-of-life. This modulation of high/low is a signature Almodóvar style that, at first, he seemed to be growing out of here. Though that’s a bit disappointing, the ending makes sense of what’s come before in a satisfying enough way: Ray X eventually provides the missing part of the story that Harry has been searching for: what actually happened that night that Harry (then Mateo) went blind, and lost Lena forever.

There are a few things I think Almodóvar might have done that might have tied up his themes a bit more neatly: for instance, why does Diego not hide from Harry, as has been hidden from him, the reality of that fateful moment, which has been captured, in delicious irony, on film? It seems an obvious opportunity to plumb Diego’s character, and its relationship to Mateo, that Almodóvar has missed. After all, in a story about history, memory, and innocence, the next generation is what an audience comes to care most about - and indeed, represents the concerns of a mature story-teller. Instead, Almodóvar seems to have become enamored of his recreation of his earlier movie – the film-within-a-film that’s his re-telling of Women of the Verge – which is a neat trick...but the kind of thing we might expect from a younger director, and not nearly as important to the story as the boy and his future has become.

Which is why Almodóvar’s focus in the last half hour of the film (after the momentous confessions begin) seems to be off – broader, scattered, with the humorous irony of his early films but lacking the confidence and subtly we’ve been treated to until this point. In the end, Broken Embraces is about how a movie director chooses to perceive – and edit – the painful and pleasurable moments of the past, as well as how we relive our histories through the lives around us. Almodóvar manages to keep that delicate tone in balance for most of the movie, and just a few more delicate scenes at the end to tie it all together would have made this a mature masterpiece, indeed.

Sherlock Holmes: Studio Sturm und Drang

Someone at Warner Brothers gave director Guy Ritchie a multi-million dollar budget and the script to Sherlock Holmes to create a holiday super-movie, and Ritchie did what one would expect: he created a Guy Ritchie movie, only with bigger stars and badder special effects. For some people, I suppose, that isn't such a bad thing, though the result bears little resemblance to a story by Arthur Conan Doyle.

To be fair, the plot to the movie was conceived before Ritchie came on board, so one can little blame him for the uninspiring story line of a British lord (played with all the expected deadpan seriousness by Mark Strong) who dabbles in the dark arts and escapes hangman's row to apparently come back from the dead in order to unleash the usual bits of death and destruction, in the process bedeviling the fact-obsessed Holmes (Robert Downey Jr.) and his intrepid sidekick, doctor Watson (Jude Law). There's little original here in the storyline of mystical occultism being faced down by twentieth century rational deduction, though the studio would apparently wish it so.

Which isn't to say that there isn't some outstanding talent behind the film. Ritchie, of course, brings his rough-and-tumble British low-life sensibility to the movie, imagining Holmes as a kind of roguish, professional boxing, deductive savant (effectively turning him into the kind of super-hero he probably wishes he had helming his earlier, lower budget outings, which were so much more effective for their simple roguishness and lack of high-tech pomposity). Holmes is effectively able to deduce within milliseconds on the fly and in stop-time slow motion (much as, I suppose, Stephen Hawkings is capable of imagining the entire mathematics of the birth of the universe in his head), though he lacks the basic social skills necessary to conduct a simple dinner conversation with Watson's new fiance. That's not to mention his uncanny James-Bond-like ability to disable even the most imposing of combatants (or five) with a few critically placed karate chops. That any of this is potentially possible is entirely besides the point: the point is whether Robert Downey Junior can turn the character into an entertaining spectacle of twitches, ticks, and nervous recitations for an hour and a half, which he effective does, earning, once again, my admiration for his most recent abilities (see Iron Man and Tropic Thunder).

Jude Law also handles his own as Downey's counterpart, keeping the toy of Holmes wound up as necessary and battling his own twin demons of gambling and an entirely uninteresting courtship with a superfluous lady friend (whose only purpose in the movie seems to be to keep us from fully realizing the entirely homo-attractive underpinnings of the Holmes/Watson relationship).

One sometimes gets lucky when one has a studio tent-pole movie budget to work with, and Ritchie basically does: his sound crew does an amazing job with the sound editing (expect the movie to be nominated here), and the art and set design is right-on, and no more clearly expressed than in the end credits, which are certainly the most beautiful part of the movie and the best credits seen in film since Lemony Snicket (if they nominated credits for Oscars, this movie would be a shoe in this year).

And yes, celebrating Downey's performance and the sound editing and ending credits of the film does mean that the rest of this baggy bundle has little to recommend it, but I do think that talent, even if found stuffed around the edges of a bloated studio popcorn flick, deserves its due. The dedication from the talented below-the-line crafts people - who create the rickety sets and the slow-motion explosions - is what basically keeps this movie afloat, delivering its ten dollars worth of holiday distraction.

Clearly, this is a movie conceived by studio producers (if one credits the Wikipedia article), and this is made no more clear than in the decision to hide the film's potentially most interesting villian - Moriarty, Holme's nemesis - entirely from view, as a set up for potential sequels. An outing between Downey's fidgety Holmes and the cool, chalky calculations of a Professor Moriarty might, indeed, be interesting. The only problem is that by the time we've gotten through this initial incarnation of the Holmes character, it's hard to know whether or not to care. A Holmes conceived as a socially inept detective-savant is an interesting idea, but without the incisive humor of, say, Jim Parson's Sheldon on CBS's "Big Bang Theory", such a character can get tiring, fast. If Warner Brothers does decide to take this property out for another outing, we'll need both a more original villain from the supposedly cleverer-than-Holmes Moriarty, as well as a little more well-placed humor.

Nine: A Play on Italian Cinema

What can I say about Rob Marshall's film version of the Broadway musical Nine other than, I wish he had pulled it off...and I wish I had seen the original play.

Nine, the play, is loosely based on the life of Federico Felllini - the cinematic auteur most associated with Italian neo-realism and, apparently, a womanizer who also suffered from depression, he was the director of the scandalous (for its time) La Dolce Vita. He also wrote the Oscar-nominated 8 1/2, a semi-autobiographical tour-de-force about a director named Guido with writer's block, which also happens to be the story underlying Nine.

In the movie Nine, the Italian director of note is Guido Contini, played with introspective intensity by Daniel Day-Lewis. Surrounding Guido is a bevvy of his women - I suppose you might call it the classical constellation of genius womanizing director's women, including Mother, Madonna (in the form of his set director), wife, mistress, celebrity, fan, and whore - played by a top-name cast, including, respectively, Sophia Lauren, Judy Dench, Marion Cotillard, Penelope Cruz, Nicole Kidman, Kate Hudson, and singing sensation, Fergie. This is the same constellation we saw in Bob Fosse's All That Jazz, and really is a staple of both French new-wave and Italian neo-realist cinema.

Unfortunately, not all these actors are suited to bring this Broadway performance to the screen. And while Marshall's technique of interspersing filmic reality with a dream "Broadway" world worked so well to make the movie Chicago a success, it undermines the effect of Nine, dragging it down from what might otherwise have been a great and memorable production.

Because this movie really had more potential to be great than I think a lot of critics are giving it credit for (my favorite quip is MaryAnn Johanson saying that "Nine is to Italian cinema what Olive Garden is to Italian food"), let's address those two problems one at a time.

First, the casting. As in Chicago, Marshall has culled together a cast of some actors who can sing and dance (Hudson, Cruz), and some who really can't (Day-Lewis, Cotillard...and, my God, Lauren). Unfortunately, the songs in Nine aren't as brilliant as Fosse's Chicago - much more classical Broadway, and with a few clunky expository numbers - and therefore, really require talent to pull off. The movie skates along, starting with a clunker opening number from Day-Lewis and a few other big clunkers along the way, occasionally hitting patches of great performances (I finally woke up when Cruz sings "A Call from the Vatican", Fergie's "Be Italian" has the benefit of at least being a good song, and Hudson's "Cinema Italiano" is the highlight of the movie).

This would all be fine, if the serious actors who were unable to sing were at least giving the correct performances. Unfortunately, the actors treat the material as if it were serious drama - with both Day-Lewis and Cotillard giving small, intimate portrayals of lives being shattered - when what we need to have are big, outrageous performances that support the movie music. One might forgive Marshall for thinking that Day-Lewis was his man to provide an out sized performance of a rapacious, Italian womanizer (after all, his performances in both Gangs of New York and There will be Blood were huge). I don't know if the fault lies in the performer of the director, here, but Day-Lewis interprets this character via the intimate mumblings of a depressed director suffering a mental collapse, all curled in on himself and shrinking away from his own universe. That's exactly the wrong interpretation for this movie: what we need is a huge appetite (as we have from Roy Scheider in All That Jazz, or say, Peter O'Toole in The Stunt Man), a man whose actions are larger than life, who's charisma makes us understand why women flock to him, and who can carry the fantasy and justify the elaborate numbers. There's even a number - "Take It All," sung by Cotillard as Luisa Contini, Guido's wife - that's supposed to be the emotional apex of the movie, where Luisa laments how her husband is all appetite, and has completely consumed her, as she strips off her clothes in a fantasized strip-tease in front of him and a crowd of lusting men. Given the performances from Day-Lewis and Cotillard, however, the number makes no sense, since Guido hasn't been consuming life but shrinking away from it. It's a good number, and had the movie set it up correctly, could have been a powerful climax to the film, as Luisa strips herself naked in her attempt to break through the bubble of attention surrounding the self-absorbed director. But as performed, with Guido self-destructing and Luisa more angry than desirous, the number lacks resonance.

Throughout the movie, Day-Lewis's performance leaves a black whole at the center of the film, which becomes very hard for the other actors to fill, and like harsh lighting, is completely unflattering - almost to the point of embarrassment - on the weaker song-and-dance performers (Sophia Lauren and Nicole Kidman, in particular); while natural stars like Cruz and Hudson are able to pull off fabulous numbers in their own right. That's a harsh criticism to make of a brilliant actor like Day-Lewis, but the problem isn't the acting so much as the interpretation. Which brings us to the other big problem with the film.

Which is that this is a movie of a play about cinema, but unfortunately, Marshall missed, here, the critical metaphor of the play. Instead, he seems to have concluded that the formula for Chicago would work just fine here: treat the drama as reality, and the musical numbers as a fantasy inside the main character's head (in this case, the fantasy of the movie he's trying to make in his head). This approach leads Marshall to apply some very fine, neo-realistic techniques to the "reality" portions (one thinks of the direction of the boys on the beach in the "Be Italian" number, which is done with outstanding neo-realistic cinematography). In fact, the "realistic" portions of the film become a kind of hodge-podge tribute to Italian neo-realistic film techniques. Where this works best is in the fantasy numbers - like Hudson's "Cinema Italiano," where technique and performance come together brilliantly. However, in the rest of the movie, the reality of the technique undermines the high irony that gives the musical numbers their pleasure.

In other words, the animating idea behind the play, which makes the play interesting (I would think), is the fun ways that one can interpret the form of Italian neo-realism for the stage. Such interpretation involves taking the neo-realistic cinematic techniques out of the story and highlighting them as techniques for the stage audience, thus letting the audience enjoy the sensation of being so aware of film style (as aware as the director must be... and possibly why he has writer's block).

Marshall has taken those techniques and simply put them back into the form of his cinema. Which is to say that he simply re-creates the neo-realist style, leaving us without the heightened irony we would get from seeing it created in the stage play (the only place we get that irony is in the Hudson number).

This is unfortunate, since the style is copied by the unit directors in the film so assiduously. But it's copied too well - there's too little ironic highlighting of the style against the story for the audience to enjoy. It might have been better to inverse the formula: to film the story as a stage play, and make the cinematic moments be the moments of flights of fancy inside the director's head. That at least would have highlighted the cinematic techniques, and possibly led Marshall to find a central metaphor for his film.

Which, ultimately, is what's missing here, and why the movie doesn't seem to hang together. It's unfortunate that the movie opens with Guido lamenting how difficult it is to make a movie - how it's sometimes impossible for all the pieces to come together, suffused with the essential magic that makes them a whole - since this is the same problem this movie suffers from (which is why self-reference is always such a dangerous game).

What ultimately needs to make Guido's movie hang together, of course, is the force of his imagination. That force needs to be illustrated well for a movie like this to succeed - both for the characters who've fallen for him in the story - and those of us watching in the audience. The pieces are all here, but unfortunately, this time, the illustration is all wrong. I thoroughly enjoyed the premise of the story, and the idea of celebrating the high art of Italian neo-realism as a kind of low-brow Broadway kitch, and the idea of seeing a constellation of beautiful actresses perform the numbers with ironic style and bravura. Marshall just didn't make that movie, no matter how much I wish he had.